[CCIP]

Hindsight is 20/20!

Originally Posted by Zosimus

As we said before, don't crash dive. Fire back, wait till the attack passes, and then dive.

While a bad idea on the face of it, it's hard to tell exactly what the situation was - and one of the real difficulties was that estimating the distance of an airplane was very hard, especially for an inexperienced crew not used to dealing with the danger. There is very little information that the commander has to make a decision, which has to be made instantly - no "distance to nearest contact" button that returns a reliable result. So it's likely that the dive was ordered based on a very imperfect estimate and poor situational awareness.

Second mistake. Don't panic. The boat was barely scratched.

Again, definitely a mistake - but very hard to gauge when you have an incomplete picture and a problematic information source. There is no damage meter on real U-boats, and crews were all too well aware of what would happen if they hesitated for even a few seconds on a seriously-damaged boat (everyone would die).

"Barely scratched" in that instance likely meant a huge boom, a lot of broken glass, knocked out instruments and lights, cracked batteries with toxic chlorine leaking out. Again, especially for a crew who had not experienced this before, this would look like the apocalypse. By the time accurate damage reports could be made, a seriously-damaged boat would have already imploded. So again, it was a mistake, but a totally understandable one - as I said, there's no damage meter on a U-boat.

Don't surrender. What's the point?

Now that one I really have to strongly disagree with - and if you read transcripts of conversations with U-boat survivors (including wartime prisoners), you will see that U-boat crews were not fanatics. There was no cult of "death or glory" in the Ubootwaffe, and even the most hardened crews (let alone fresh recruits) had a healthy will to live. For very good reasons, few of them believed in anti-British propaganda, and correctly expected humane treatment from the enemy. With a few exceptions, most U-boat crew who surrendered in a hopeless situation were treated with respect both by their captors, by their fellow POWs, and by the command and people back home. Kretschmer kept contact with BdU from the POW camp (with the allies' knowledge and tacit approval) and became a sort of "union leader" figure for U-boat POW's. The POW treatment was common knowledge - and though it certainly did not dent morale and make U-boats more likely to surrender, it certainly did make waving the white flag a very viable option when things looked grim. Although Rahmlow himself was not forgiven - an "honour tribunal" presided by Kretschmer found him guilty of cowardice - most of U-570s crew escaped any blame. Most importantly, they lived. That's no mean feat in war! So I think if you ask them (and most U-boat POWs), they'll very much tell you that there was a point to them surrendering - although admittedly, the case of U-570's surrender was a terrifically bungled one.